Copperhead, Guardian Project, and F-Droid are partnering up and want to raise funding for an “open, verifiably secure mobile ecosystem of software, services and hardware”, according to the Guardian Project’s blog.

The blog post goes on to say, “Through a future planned crowdfunded and commercial offering, the partnership will provide affordable off-the-shelf solutions, including device hardware and self-hosted app and update distribution servers, for any individual and organizations looking for complete mobile stacks they can trust.”

In other words, they want to create a truly secure phone. The phone will consist of CopperheadOS as the OS, F-Droid for your app store needs, and a slew of must-have apps for privacy and security developed by the Guardian Project. The three organizations each have a ‘specialty’ – if you will – and plan to contribute to this project accordingly.

Copperhead, a Canada-based security firm, is working on CopperheadOS, a hardened and open-source version of Android that’s based on AOSP. Some of the features it has is a hardened kernel and sandboxing. Plus, it’s proprietary software-free. The OS is currently available for download and installable on many Nexus devices.

New York-based Guardian Project develops and provides much of the software on CopperheadOS such as Orbot, ChatSecure, and ObscuraCam.

F-Droid, a non-profit volunteer project based in England, is the default app store on CopperheadOS and provides “private, unblockable app stores”.

The founder and director of the Guardian Project, Nathan Freitas, uses CopperheadOS himself.

“I have been a happy CopperheadOS user since the first moment I installed it, even with running it on a two-generation old, very inexpensive Nexus 5 device. I know I will always have the latest security updates immediately, and that everything on my device is under my control.”

With this partnership in place, the groups “hope to expand the effort to include other mobile OS teams, application developers and even hardware developers interested in having the same kind of impact on the privacy and security of mobile computing.”